Press releases

The Book of Xen—New from No Starch Press: The System Administrator's Guide to Virtualization with Xen

Press release: October 14, 2009

The Book of Xen San Francisco, CA, October 14, 2009—Xen is a system administrator's dream come true: a high quality, high performance virtual machine monitor. Xen lets sysadmins consolidate their machines and finally put those unused cycles to use, saving money on hardware, maintenance, and electricity—without sacrificing reliability, performance, or scalability.

The Book of Xen (No Starch Press, October 2009, 312 pp., $49.95, ISBN 9781593271862) gives readers both theoretical discussions of Xen's underpinnings and practical examples of Xen in action. Expert authors Chris Takemura and Luke S. Crawford begin with a high-level overview of Xen and then delve into the advanced details, like installation, networking, memory management, and virtualized storage. They also explain how to use Xen and standard Linux tools to take snapshot backups, perform QoS operations on network traffic, and limit over-aggressive disk users.

"Xen is cool stuff, but it's also deep and wide and dense," said Paul Vixie, architect of BIND and president of Internet Systems Consortium. "Luke and Chris have unscrambled Xen into the linear form of a printed book in about the best way I can imagine anybody doing it."

The Book of Xen teaches readers how to:

  • Provide virtual hosting for dozens of users, each with their own individual needs
  • Install and manage multiple guests, including various flavors of Linux, NetBSD, Solaris, and Windows
  • Choose the right virtual storage option
  • Migrate their systems seamlessly and create new images
  • Tune and benchmark their systems to make them as fast as possible
  • Troubleshoot Xen's most common problems like network and memory management

Takemura and Crawford are long-time Xen consultants and use the technology extensively in their hosting company, prgmr.com. In The Book of Xen, they share their hard-won experience with verve and style. And when it comes to running a complicated open source virtualization technology like Xen, expert advice is priceless.

For more information or to request a review copy of The Book of Xen, contact Travis Peterson at No Starch Press (nostarchpr@oreilly.com, +1.415.863.9900, x300), or visit www.nostarch.com.

About the Authors
Chris Takemura is a longtime *nix sysadmin, Perl hacker, and technological hobbyist. He's been using Xen from its early days, and helped to build prgmr.com's reputation as "hosting for the technically adept."

Luke S. Crawford has used virtualization in production since before it was cool, virtualizing hundreds of servers for large and small corporations. He launched the prgmr.com VPS service in 2005, selling virtual servers based on FreeBSD jails before switching to Xen in an effort to more fairly allocate resources.

Additional Resources
Chapter 7: "Hosting Untrusted Users Under Xen: Lessons from the Trenches" (PDF)
Table of contents overview
Detailed table of contents (PDF)
Index (PDF)
Large cover image

The Book of Xen The Book of Xen
by Chris Takemura and Luke S. Crawford
October 2009, 312 pp
ISBN 9781593271862, $49.95 USD
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000

Available in fine bookstores everywhere, from www.oreilly.com/nostarch, or directly from No Starch Press (http://www.nostarch.com/, orders@nostarch.com, 1-800-420-7240).

About No Starch Press
Founded in 1994, No Starch Press is one of the few remaining independent computer book publishers. We publish the finest in geek entertainment—unique books on technology, with a focus on open source, security, hacking, programming, alternative operating systems, and LEGO. Our titles have personality, our authors are passionate, and our books tackle topics that people care about. Visit http://www.nostarch.com for a complete catalog. "The Book of" is a trademark of No Starch Press, Inc.

About O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

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